January 5, 2010
Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri
 

Students of the Amrita School of Engineering at Amritapuri recently traveled to Dubai to present papers at two of five parallel conferences organized by the International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology.
 

“It was an awesome experience,” they shared. “We had the opportunity to present our work before eminent scientists from 24 countries.” A total of three papers were presented at the International Conferences on Computer and Electrical Engineering as well as MEMS, NANO and Smart Systems.
 

The first paper titled Low Power Microcontroller Based Simple Smart Token Number Display System was authored by Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Sreenath P S, Devidayal Soman, Jessin P A and Srikanth. It was based on the students’ work in designing and building a system to display token numbers for banks and restaurants, where customers are served in queues.
 

“The system displays numbers from 0 to 99,” explained the students. Modeled after similar systems that are already in place, where people don’t have to stand in a queue, but can come up to the counter when their token number is displayed, their system had some important innovations. It was designed to use less power.
 

“We used the PIC16F877A microcontroller for the software design in the processing unit,” they explained. “A peripheral keypad is interfaced with the microcontroller. Each set of display units consists of two seven segment displays which get input from a BCD decoder/driver operating in open collector configuration.”
 

How does the system ensure less usage of power? “The system is controlled by software that makes the microcontroller go into sleep mode when the system is not being used; this helps save power.” The other papers also resulted from the students’ work in making versions of electronic devices, already in use, that were however, optimized to use less power.
 

Power Aware Automatic Microcontroller Based Smart, College Electric Bell System with Time Display authored by Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Venkat Krishnan Balasubramanian, Mithun Muralidharan Nair, Vineeth Sarma Venugopala Sarma, Rahul Srikumar discussed the hardware implementation of a low power automatic bell.
 

Low Power Consumption Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Adder, authored by Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Gautham P and Parthasarathy R analyzed a coarse grained reconfigurable adder which could be dynamically reconfigured with respect to bitwidth of operands. Using multiplexers and appropriate control bits, part of the architecture could be powered-down according to the requirement, thereby saving power because of the inactive state of unused part.
 

“Experimental results of this design show the edge over existing design in terms of power consumption,’ stated Rajesh Kannan, faculty in the Department of ECE, who accompanied the students and presented this final paper.